Kennedy and her goons don't want to work towards anything, they do not want to earn anything. They just want to have something without working for it.
They want to have a character that's badass, so they make a character, tell everyone said character is badass and if you disagree, why, you're just a nazi in disguise. And cause they think being lighthearted is always a good thing, Phasma is treated like a joke in TFA and since they are afraid to make their precious OC-do-not-steal characters suffer, she poses no threat in TLJ.
The thing is, when it comes down to individual shots of Phasma, they actually do a good job of portraying her. The scene where she walks towards finn and rose after the hangar blew up with the smoke and light giving her that fuckhuge shadow, that's a nice scene, visually. The scene where Finn hits her helmet with that cattle-prod thingy looks good, too. The blow really seems to carry a shitton of weight.
Even the scene where she falls down into the flames looks neat.
The problem is that every single other moment with her is so fucking stupid that these scenes fail to draw you in cause you don't give a shit about Phasma. She's a loser. She's uninteresting. And she's just a minor inconvenience whenever she pops up, to be easily disposed off by a mugging asshole.
The feeling I get is that someone had a few good ideas on how to portray Phasma and a few cool scenes in his head, but he completely dropped the ball when it came to connecting these to a plot that's worth a damn.
You know, at this point, having Palpatine show up in IX and endlessly doing dad-jokes would be a step up for this trilogy.
Emo Ren: "I'm angry"
Palpatine: "Hello Angry, I'm Palpatine."
